The fifteen-year-old girl is the most powerful and powerless creature on earth. She has the body of a woman her ankle jewels her weeping hair and she has the psyche of a girl I was always breaking into my own house. House of my feelings, house of my intuition, house of my authority. When I grow up I want to be a bitch, I mean a door, I mean a poet--I was not acquainted with my power or my natural rhythms as a woman, and I did not understand the anger I felt at this—and yet, and so, I FELT it.The fifteen year girl has the superpower of shard… When I was fifteen, I was a font of rage. I used to pull juice glasses from the kitchen cabinet, take them outside and cast them against the bricks of the house: pleasure, shatter, gleam. It felt so good to destroy something beautiful, to laugh dangerously into the burgeoning night. There was much I did not know then, but I knew how to surrender to the intensity of my feelings, to let even the ugliness course through me, and I knew enough to laugh. All emotion (energy in motion) needs a channel to flow through. We are the vessels—we surrender, we open, or we wind up in shards ourselves. Lightning flash forward, fifteen years on, present day: I am so angry at someone, I slam my fist into a door. Umm what?! I’m rubbing my hand, I’m surprised at my wild weird body. Am I sorry? Do I feel bad about reacting? Actually, there are tears in my eyes, and actually, I’m laughing. I feel very good, though not in a placid or meek way. I feel the integrity of energy in motion, the freedom in surrendering. Sure, there are loads more creative, less painful ways to express this energy (read on, friend), and yet, and yet, this too was my thunder, which is a return, a homecoming to some heartwood I’d been seeking. There is freedom in following our wild rhythms allied with the moon and the seasons…ways of sleeping, dreaming, moving, creating. In tracing our path back to these rhythms—because we’ve been so long and so grievously banished from our birthright to experience wholeness—we meet our “ugly” feelings, rage, jealousy, fear. And it is right to feel it. It is right to scream, stomp, start a fire. AND if we can keep our integrity in these moments and follow the energy, if we can use our rage as creative fuel—for poems, paintings, movement, activism, teaching, witnessing—then we transform ourselves and our world. We grow up finally from teenager tantrums into adult action, and we teach others through resonance. We influence our world, simply by feeling, and following that feeling wherever it takes us. More great news is that there is a highly intelligent blueprint pulsing in each one of our cells that teaches us how to feel with depth, integrity and follow-through. In my donation-based hatha yoga class at Yess Yoga this Saturday (5/17) 11:30am-12:30pm, we’ll be exploring our feeling selves from the cellular level on up, discovering & empowering ourselves to experience freedom in integrity. No glass will be shattered, except perhaps the barriers between you and your free-flying self!